Henry Umunnakwe is the president of the Rwandan chapter of AIESEC - Association Internationale des Etudiants en Sciences Economiques Commerciales, a global exchange organisation with headquarters in the Netherlands. The organisation provides a platform for young university students to acquire professional networks, leadership skills, self discovery and securing employment abroad, among others.

Who is Umunnakwe?

I am a youth from Nigeria, but a Rwandan by heart because I’ve been living in Rwanda since early 2014. I moved to Rwanda to work as the Human Resource Manager for AIESEC, and really I think it’s been one of the most challenging and at the same time interesting experiences for me as a young person, because apart from working with young people here in Rwanda, it also gave me the opportunity to learn from the way the society was able to transform itself, and coming from Nigeria that has a lot and cannot transform itself, this is a big learning experience for me so if I go back home, I will know how to engage stakeholders and policy-makers basing on the experience I’ve got from here.

How does AIESEC impact the youth it works with?

I’ve been working with AIESEC for the past five years, and AIESEC is an international organization that provides a platform for young people to explore and develop their potential.

You could develop your skills in different fields, for instance I’m an engineer in oil and gas, but because of AIESEC I know a lot about human resource management, Information Technology and Information management, because it provided me the platform to explore and develop this potential in me. I wouldn’t have known I had the potential in all these things, but I credit this to the five years working with AIESEC in different countries. 

I’ve worked in Nigeria, Ghana, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, and right now we are developing a program for the entire African continent. 

So I think from a deeper perspective when I’m doing something for the continent because I’ve had experience from several countries, and what I noticed in all these countries is that we face similar challenges.

What are those challenges?

For instance poverty and quality of education and health care are still a major issue on the continent, and all of us as Africans are trying to solve these problems individually while we could collaborate. 

Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania could for example collaborate to solve those problems that are common to all of them.

Actually my next target is to apply to AIESEC International, our global office in the Netherlands, but to manage Africa because I’m very passionate about our continent and I believe we have the potential to grow and unleash the beauty in us. That’s one thing we’ve not really explored as Africans. A young person in Uganda doesn’t know what is happening in Kenya, the young person in Rwanda doesn’t know what is happening in Uganda. So we have not even explored ourselves, and the Western world refers to us as Africa as a country because we are not doing enough to showcase where we are from. 

There are a lot of beautiful things that we need to make the world know about us, and not just the way they want to see us. I’m very passionate about this and I’m working so hard to make sure that this happens. 

From 9-14 December we were at the United Nations where AIESEC globally and also AIESEC in Africa we were talking about how we could create actions on the sustainable development goals, because like I said earlier, AIESEC is an action-oriented organization. We look at a particular society’s needs, and then we create solutions based on that.

What projects is AIESEC doing in Rwanda at the moment?

Our latest project is with an organization called Beauty of Rwanda. 

We got contacted by Beauty of Rwanda in 2014 and by then I was responsible for developing community projects in Rwanda. 

I got to understand their concept –Beauty of Rwanda provides an opportunity for the crafts women of Byimana village in Ruhango district to secure markets for them abroad and also in Rwanda. 

One of the problems the women faced, even after securing markets for their crafts was that of financial management because they lacked financial literacy. So the role of AIESEC is to provide financial education where we teach them how to save, book-keeping, and how to actually make wise investment and also re-investment choices. 

In Uganda we have a similar project called Beads for Africa and even in Nigeria we have such organizations.